Monday, September 11, 2017

The Triumphant Return of Budget Porn!

After a multi-year hiatus, we are bringing back the blog's most popular running series: budget porn.

I took down all the porn after I was interviewed for an article by a reporter, and then, that night, quickly freaked out about our anonymity being blown. I emailed the reporter and pleaded with her to please kill the article, which was a jerk move on my part as she'd already started working on it.

She was nice enough to acquiesce, but the interview brought our feelings about what we wanted to keep private into focus.

We thought our net worth updates sounded tone deaf and braggy, especially as our net worth increased. With so many people struggling, how helpful was it to chart our ever-improving march towards a million?

For whose benefit were we really writing these articles? Was it really to inspire others to grow their net worth, or might it be more for my personal feeling of worth?

When we decided to take the net worth posts down, the monthly budget posts got caught in the same net. Why not go fully anonymous?

But last week I chatted with Mrs. Frugalwoods on Skype, and she was kind enough to give me some advice on how to improve our blog. The main take-away was to open up: to show people the real way we lived. And in the realm of personal finance, that might also mean how we spend our dollars while we're pursuing financial independence.

So that's what we're going to do. We're bringing back budget porn, stripping all the way down to the penny for each line item. You'll get to see the good and the bad: no filter. (And trust me dear readers, with our new house begging for some new stuff to go into it, there is plenty of bad to see in the coming months.)

So make sure your significant other isn't home, pull the curtains, and get ready to peek at our naked budget, you dirty, voyeur perv.

Total August Spend: $3,533

Non-Mortgage Spend: $1,976

Annual Spend YTD: $30,853

Forecast 2017 Spend: $46,279

For you folks who like getting down into the weeds, here are a few explanatory notes:

The health insurance cost is just for me; Mrs. Done by Forty is covered under the university's health insurance, and will continue so long as she's a PhD student. The dental and vision costs are for both of us.

Gas is generally low as we only have one car, I work from a home office, and we scoot when we can.

Our phone service is through Airvoice Wireless, an AT&T MVNO. I use the $10/month plan, and Mrs. Done by Forty uses the $20/month plan.

Our new mortgage accounts for a lot of the new spending, coming it at over $1,500 dollars. We're choosing to count all of this in our spending category, even though a decent chunk of about $400 is technically principal repayment, and another $150 or so goes towards property taxes which, thanks to our new mortgage, we can deduct when we itemize. Still, the mortgage is a bill we have to pay through nearly thirty years of financial independence, so why not call the whole thing spending when working our four percent rule?

We managed to have a negative spend in travel this month, as I stumbled across the $200 in cash we brought to Europe for emergencies, and had already marked as spent. Hooray for accounting errors!

Our grocery spending has been above $400 for the majority of the months in 2017, which is higher than it's been in prior years. I suspect that beer is the culprit, but after reading a post from Planting Our Pennies, I wonder if we're just seeing inflation in food prices. Regardless, I'd like to use $400 as a cap, and I'm hoping these monthly posts will provide some external motivation to be a bit more frugal here.

We also had some extra expenses on the homefront this month. The outlier was when we had to rent a carpet cleaner and tried out a bunch of solvents to try to get pee stains (i.e. - smells) out of the living room carpet. Cayenne developed a new habit of peeing on the carpet while we were abroad. You know, rather than the tile that's in the adjacent kitchen and dining room. I think we basically have the smell out, but may need to rent the cleaner one more time.

The other new expense is our pool, which requires a steady diet of chlorine and, since it has a new pebble tec coating, some muriatic acid added from time to time. And while it's an ongoing expense, the pool does allows for moments like these:

18 comments:

Your electric bill! ouch!! It's so funny though how the numbers look so different depending on region. You have a house for a mortgage of 1600, I have a one-bedroom tiny POC for $1450. But my electric bill is dirt cheap in comparison because I don't have AC, and it's small!

It's going down a bit now ($215 or so for Sept) so it looks like that's the high water mark. I expect we'll be down in the $100 range once we turn off the AC, but we'll just have to see as it's a new house.

Just one more reason we miss Southern CA.

For what it's worth, Mrs. Done by Forty and I were renting one bedroom (just one room in a house) and sharing a bathroom with the other renter, and still paying $800 a month, at the last place we rented before heading to AZ.

We are keen on having beers on hand when people come over or we head to their house, which is a few times a week. So it ends up being a couple twelve packs per week, and at $15 or more a pop, it ads up.

LOVE the pic of the dogs in the pool - they are SO cute!!! I'm willing to bet your budget is pretty reasonable in comparison to your income. I'm SO glad we don't drink. I always watch all of the Sam's Club customers walk out of the liquor store door with boxes of bottles of booze, and it makes me cringe thinking of all of the money they just spent. :-)

Thanks for the comment, Laurie, and I do think our budget falls within a pretty reasonable slice of our overall income. We used to save 70% of our income but these days were in the 60% range. Not much has changed except that we have a mortgage, and a bigger one: and having a paid off home kind of distorts the savings figures anyway.

Love that you don't drink. We've kicked around the idea of a sober month. Maybe that'll be a good way to see if the added costs really are from the booze!

I don't know if I'd say I have a grand vision, per se. This is still just my hobby blog, and I kind of like it that way. I can write about whatever I think is interesting that day or week. Someday, I'd like to write a book about the whole process of getting to FI .

Ha, and I had actually commented on that post so I should have remembered it..

I have written on my site for a decade, and also consider it a hobby. It would seem like a lot of extra stress if I have it all out there. Hats off to everyone else who is public with almost everything..

I can see why you stopped sharing but I agree that the more people are open about this sort of thing the better.

Our spending is roughly the same but in £££. Just goes to show you don't have to be super frugal to attempt FI, just cut out the ridiculous spending. You spend more on the mortgage but we tend to spend more on going out by the looks... But then you do have a pool at home to keep you entertained!

I always thought you folks in the UK had a great opportunity for geographic arbitrage. Earn your income and sock away savings in British pounds, then go anywhere you want in the world to spend it in RE. A million in pounds goes a lot farther than a million dollars here in AZ, in case you ever want to relocate somewhere warmer.

Your costs look pretty reasonable--with the exception of the electricity and water bill. Ouch.

Also, what's the difference between New Home Spend and Home Improvement?

That pool looks amazing! I've always liked the idea of having a pool but I'm way to lazy to do the maintenance and the upkeep. So far renting places with communal pools or going to spas have worked out well for us.

Yeah, the electric & water/trash/sewer bills are high, but this is also the high water mark as August is our hottest month. We'll see the prices decline steadily over the next 12 months.

So new home spend is more like furnishing our house (appliances, furniture, and stuff we just want) and home improvement is plain old repairs: stuff we buy at Lowes, and in this case, some chemicals and parts for the pool.

Somewhat surprisingly, the pool is very little actual work. You can see the hose to the vacuum that runs at night, along with the skimmer. Once a week, I do have to brush the sides of the pool and add in the chlorine, and dump out the basket. But it's maybe 30 minutes of actual work a week...provided nothing breaks. :)

But yes, I definitely remember how easy it was renting. No work for maintenance at all!

Hey DBF,Pretty reasonable numbers you got there. Could you tell us what internet plan to you have to pay so little? I'm stuck with a pretty damn expensive xfinity minimal plan and I can't find a better option around...any ideas?

We use Centurylink at the 40GB/sec speed, and we negotiate the rate down every year. I basically call up and say it's too much, that we're on a budget, and what could they do to reduce the price. They bring it down to around $30 or so. The remaining $12/month in that category is for Hulu.

Beer! OMG. I think it's a likely culprit in my own monthly budget excess. Just another bad Australian habit. Thanks for posting your figures (oh such fine figures *ahem* let me compose myself). Genuinely DBF it's motivational fuel in the tank for those of us further back in the pack.

If there's one thing I have in common with the Aussies, it's surely a love for beer.

And thanks for the kind words about my figure...um, figures. Let's just move on.

I took a look at your blog and it seems our families are following a similar path: with a Masters+PhD candidate in the house. Achieving FI along with pursuing a long-term degree definitely is a bit harder, but I'm struck with how quickly it can still be done.

Disclaimer: This blog is written for entertainment purposes only: not to give advice. I'm just some dude on the internet, and one without a whole lot of credentials. It's a good idea to consult with professional before making investment, tax, or financial decisions.